Ruby's Secret
by shadow282
Summary: Ruby Rose is hiding something. Unfortunately for her, she's not terribly good at it. Will her teammates be able to find out her secret? Can Team RWBY survive the revelation or will their dynamic be changed forever? White Rose.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N This is my first fanfic (and my first piece of creative writing in quite a while). I thought I'd start off with a light, simple story. It's set at Beacon before Volume 3. Any reviews (good or bad) would be greatly appreciated.**

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Ruby Rose was hiding something, and Blake was determined to find out what. She had noticed the behavior last month, but last week's sparring had shown it more clearly than ever: Ruby had stopped using her semblance. Their team leader had never exactly been shy about using it; every place they ever fought ended up coated in rose petals. Before last month, Blake would have sworn Ruby _couldn't_ fight without leaving them behind. Until suddenly, she didn't. As soon as she had noticed it, Blake had filed the fact away without any real concern. If Ruby wanted to fight without leaning on her semblance, that was fine with her.

Last week was the first time Blake had really become concerned. RWBY and JNPR had rented out a practice field for a few hours, and they were taking turns sparring in pairs. Ruby and Weiss were fighting against Ren and Nora when Nora managed to slip inside Ruby's guard and brought a full force swing of her hammer directly at Ruby's stomach. Blake had expected the move she had seen a hundred times: Ruby jumping backward and disappearing, leaving the blow to harmlessly sail through a cloud of petals. Instead, Ruby took the full force of the blow and slammed straight into the training room wall. Blake had just stared in shock. In all her time at Beacon, she had never seen her leader take a direct hit nearly that hard. Ruby always managed to dodge out of the way.

Once she started paying more attention, she noticed other suspicious behavior. Bags under Ruby's eyes, fewer enthusiastic outbursts, midnight trips that took a lot longer than her usual "cookie raid" missions. All in all, it was enough to make Blake certain she needed to find out Ruby's problem.

Tonight was the night that she had decided to do it. Blake went to bed early, hiding under the covers so her team wouldn't notice she never changed out of her clothes. She didn't bother trying to stay up; there was no real chance Ruby would be able to leave without her notice. Sure enough, she awoke to a small noise as Ruby was trying to silently sneak out of the room.

 _Trying and failing miserably. She's lucky everyone else is a heavy sleeper._

Blake followed Ruby outside the dorms and onto the grounds, moving silently from shadow to shadow. It wasn't particularly difficult. Even at her best, Ruby didn't have the greatest situational awareness, and she was clearly so distracted tonight Blake could have walked a few feet behind Ruby without alerting her. Her curiosity grew as Ruby left the school and moved into the forest, stopping in the first clearing she found that was out of sight of the school. Blake found a hidden perch in the trees and waited. Her night vision made the clearing as bright as a sunny day, and she could clearly see Ruby standing still with a look of concentration on her face.

Ruby suddenly shot into motion, turning into a blur and a cloud of petals. As she watched her team leader zip around with her semblance, Blake released the breath she hadn't realized she was holding. However, her relief at seeing her leader fighting normally started to fade as she looked closer at the clearing.

 _Are those…_

"Nope! I am NOT dealing with this! This is not my responsibility!" Blake hissed as her rising panic overrode her desire to stay silent. Even if she wanted to, direct confrontation was the only possible way to solve this and that was not her preferred way of dealing with things. Of course, she knew someone who loved that approach…


	2. Chapter 2

Her little sister had a problem, and Yang was going to fix it. Of course, she didn't know what the problem was yet, but that would change soon enough. It was just a matter of applying the right pressure.

Yang and Ruby had always been very close. There were only a handful of times that Ruby had felt the need to hide something from her. Unfortunately for Ruby, Yang had figured out how to change that years ago.

She had originally devised this method to find out where Ruby had hidden the cookie jars, but it had served her well over the years. As they grew up she had resolved to only use it in dire circumstances, which this situation definitely qualified for. After all, it was an older sister's job to always protect her younger sibling, and how could she possibly help if she didn't know the problem?

She had noticed something off about Ruby's behavior recently, but she had chalked it up to just her being overprotective until Blake had mentioned those same concerns. She had muttered something about Ruby's semblance being off before shuffling off to collapse onto her bed. Yang wasn't stupid, the slightly haunted look in her partners eyes had shown that she clearly knew more than she was letting on. But as much fun as dragging the information out of Blake would have been, she knew Blake wouldn't give up quickly. Her eyes had Yang worried enough that she decided to go for the simplest approach.

As she approached Ruby sitting in the cafeteria, Yang reminded herself that she was doing this for Ruby's own good. Which made it incredibly east to grab Ruby's cloak in a vise grip and drag her into the nearest classroom, ignoring her little sisters questioning pleas to put her down. She tossed Ruby into the room, quickly locked the door, leaned against the doorframe, and started counting down in her head without a word.

 _300, 299,_

"Yang, let me out! Come on, please? You know I hate this."

… _271, 270,_

Ruby started banging on the door "Someone help me, my sister has gone crazy!"

… _239, 238,_

She heard Ruby move away from the door and start trying to open each of the windows, making small noises of anger as she failed at each one.

… _137, 136,_

"I have no idea what you want anyway! I can't tell you anything if you don't talk to me!"

… _124, 123,_

"Whatever, I'll just sit here and wait. You'll need to leave eventually and I'll just stroll out of here"

… _21, 20,_

"Fine, I'll tell you. Just open the door."

Yang couldn't keep a small smile from her face as she walked into the room and waited. Ruby fidgeted nervously for a second before saying "It's easier if I just show you" and using her semblance to speed across the room.

What Yang saw stopped her in her tracks. She had been prepared for a whole host of potential problems, but this particular one had never even occurred to her. The room was filled with rose petals falling to the ground. That was normal. What was very much not normal was that these petals were snow white.

 _But that means…_

The sight filled her with mixed emotions. Her sisters change was absolutely adorable, but Weiss was going to flip if they didn't break this to her the right way.

A sudden loud cry roused Yang from her mental speed bump "Listen I know I should have told you, but I wasn't sure what happened and I wanted to wait until I knew more before dragging you into this."

That was clearly a lie. Yang could tell from the look in Ruby's eyes that she knew exactly what had caused the change. She decided to just cut to the chase and broach the subject she knew her sister was afraid of saying aloud.

"Don't you think this has something to do with your feelings for Weiss?"

"What, you mean like my super best friend feelings? Because I definitely don't have feelings feelings for her!" she said, turning a shade as red as her cloak. Yang just stood there, staring into Ruby's silver eyes and waiting.

"Okay, maybe I have a slight crush on her. But that makes it worse! If I show it to her, she'll hate me and not want to be on my team and transfer out and never talk to me again!" she cried out, tears suddenly filling her eyes.

Somehow Yang doubted a small crush could change Ruby's semblance, but she decided not to push her past where she was comfortable. And while Weiss's feelings for Ruby were apparently clear to everyone but them, Yang still thought announcing it like this would definitely be too much for the heiress to handle.

"It'll be fine Ruby. Let me talk to Blake and we'll come up with a good explanation for you." _Of course, the talking will come after I wring her neck for dropping this on me without any warning._ But there was no reason to mention that part to Ruby. "Just keep it under wraps for a little longer, and we'll figure it out together."

Yang braced herself for what she knew was coming next. Sure enough, there was a sudden blur and her sister wrapped her in a tight hug.

"Don't worry Ruby, we won't let anything bad happen. I promise".


	3. Chapter 3

Her teammates were hiding something from her, and Weiss was determined to uncover the secret. The last few days had seen three different instances of Blake and Yang breaking off a whispered conversation as soon as Weiss walked into the room. This was, obviously, completely unacceptable behavior from her team. At least Ruby was still acting normally.

 _Well, as normal as that girl ever gets._

Fortunately, she had a foolproof plan to make her teammates come clean. Weiss waited all day until the entire team was back in their room relaxing before saying "I know you're hiding something from me, and I demand to know what!"

Her three teammates exchanged guilty glances and moved to the center of the room. She had just been annoyed at Blake and Yang but seeing that Ruby was clearly also in on the secret hurt more than she expected.

Yang sighed and said "Fine, we might as well get this over with. Ruby, just show her". Yang's words seemed to only cause Ruby to fidget nervously and blush a slight shade of red.

 _She's so adorable when she…_ Weiss started thinking before she cut herself off. No good could come from that line of thinking, and she instead said "Well, what are you waiting for?"

Ruby suddenly blurred into motion, leaving behind her usual cloud of rose petals. Except this time the petals were pure white. Weiss' heart rate picked up slightly, and she felt a slow flush coming to her face. She studiously ignored those inconvenient facts and just raised her right eyebrow, staring at Ruby and waiting for an explanation.

"Well, you see, the thing is-"

"Ruby's semblances sometimes changes colors, and this time the roses happened to turn white" Yang said, quickly coming to the rescue of her clearly struggling sister.

The explanation brought a slight flutter of disappointment to Weiss, but she managed to keep her voice steady as she questioned "Why were you hiding that from me? It doesn't seem like that big a deal."

"I just thought you might think it was a little weird for my semblance to change like that, and I didn't want you to think I wasn't normal. It was silly, I know." Ruby blurted out, staring directly at the floor.

Now _that_ explanation didn't hold up at all, but Weiss decided to let the clearly uncomfortable girl off the hook. "Whatever, I don't really care. Just make sure you never hide anything from me again."

"Really? Good, great, that's fantastic, thank you! I promise I won't!" her partner said, finally looking up at her.

But as Weiss laid down to bed, she couldn't stop thinking of other explanations for Ruby's behavior. Why was she so nervous if it was a normal occurrence? She thought of several possibilities before coming to one possible conclusion. She tried to dismiss it out of hand, but it wouldn't stop popping into her head.

 _What if they were for me?_

A ridiculous notion, surely, but one that filled her with a strange mix of happiness and hope that she didn't particularly feel like exploring tonight. She decided to just bask in the warm feeling and drifted off to sleep, a small smile resting on her face.

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 **And that's it. I hope you enjoyed it. Again, any reviews would be greatly appreciated.**


	4. Chapter 4

**I had originally meant for this to be done after the last chapter, but once I had finished it I realized there were still a few ideas I had for the story.**

"Are both contestants ready? All right, begin!" Miss Goodwitch said.

Weiss watched as her partner leapt straight at Cardin Winchester. He swung his mace at her charge, but she suddenly blurred around him, swinging her beloved Crescent Rose into his side. He tried to pivot and swing around but she was gone again, leaping above him and using gravity to bring her scythe hard onto his head. The fight continued in the same vein, with Cardin swinging around and Ruby always dodging before scoring a quick strike on his side or back. Inevitably, Ruby wore down his aura until the buzzer screeched and ended the duel.

"Excellent job Miss Rose. Mr. Winchester, thank you for successfully demonstrating the futility of trying to fight a smaller, faster opponent with powerful strikes. Class dismissed."

Ruby gave Weiss a wide smile as she practically skipped towards her. However, Weiss was barely looking at her. She was too busy staring at the white rose petals still floating to the ground. Even now, weeks after Ruby showed her the change to her semblance, the sight still caused Weiss' heart to flutter, filling her with a strange mix of emotions.

She had spent the last weeks thinking about the white petals. No matter how much she tried to ignore it, her thoughts kept turning to them. She knew that they were almost certainly unrelated to her, that Ruby's actions were just her being Ruby. But there was still this quiet yet persistent voice in her head that said maybe, just maybe, she had caused Ruby's change. Her thoughts were stuck in this constant cycle, convincing herself it meant nothing before feeling that mix of happiness and hope deep in her heart. Weiss knew that she needed to break this cycle sooner rather than later. She also knew exactly what she needed to do to end it. Just a simple, honest talk with Ruby would clear the whole thing up. But every time she tried to bring it up, the words had gotten caught in her throat right before she could say them.

Because it wasn't just the semblance change. Ruby walked closer to Weiss than anyone else. She found excuses to brush against her or try to hold her hand. Any compliment, no matter how small, caused a bright red blush on her face. Any insult seemed to bring her close to tears.

Unless she wasn't and it didn't. Unless Weiss was reading too much into all her actions. Unless she was imagining things because of Ruby's change. After all, she had only started noticing these things the day after Ruby had shown her the white rose petals. Maybe there really wasn't anything there at all. Maybe this was just what someone acted like with their best friend. It's not like she had any previous experience for comparison.

Tomorrow, Weiss decided. Tomorrow she'll get Ruby alone and ask her. Tomorrow she'll end this one way or another. _Of course, this is the sixth tomorrow you've had so far._ Weiss reminded herself to shut up and started to brace herself for the conversation.

Weiss woke up to a beautiful Saturday morning. She went over the plans for today. Sparring practice in the morning before she would drag Ruby to the library to study. Come back to the room before dinner and find some excuse to keep Ruby back for a while to get rid of Blake and Yang. Finally have the conversation and end the cycle.

Weiss was barely paying attention during the sparring. She was too busy working up her courage for tonight. She asked to go last and half-watched Blake and Yang fight, too consumed in her own thoughts to actually absorb the matches. She didn't even notice when Ruby stepped onto the field. She barely noticed when Ruby rushed forward and started the match. However, as the match went on she sensed that something was wrong. Her thoughts snapped to the present and she looked at the field.

When she saw what was different she felt a sudden dropping feeling in her heart. Weiss felt herself unable to catch her breath, her eyes fixed on the middle of the field. She watched as rose petals slowly fell to the ground.

Specifically, red rose petals. Not a speck of white anywhere to be found. She ripped her eyes away and turned around, barely able to keep the tears she felt forming in her eyes from falling.


	5. Chapter 5

_Not for me. They were never for me._ Which Weiss had obviously known. Her teammates had said as much when she found out. She had told herself that over and over again. Yang had said they would change back to normal. This crushing disappointment she felt, this empty feeling she had, shouldn't exist. Weiss was still on the open field, but suddenly she felt like walls were closing in on her. All she knew was that she needed to be alone, needed to be anywhere but here. She turned to Yang, muttered something about feeling ill, and practically ran towards the school.

Weiss knew she was stuck in her own head, lost in her feelings. Ruby hadn't changed her semblance for her. Weiss had just managed to convince herself of that. Some part of her knew that this didn't change anything else about Ruby's behavior. This didn't mean Ruby couldn't still share her feelings. But right now that didn't matter. All that she knew was that right now it _hurt_ , deeper than anything she had felt before.

Weiss heard someone walk up to the door and begin to slowly open it. She quickly rolled over on her bed and faced the wall. She knew nobody could see her like this. How could she possibly explain what she was feeling? How could she talk about this crushing feeling without talking about Ruby? "Weiss, are you feeling okay? You sort of sprinted off the training field." She heard Ruby whisper as she walked towards her. _Of course she had to come check on me_. After all, Weiss was her friend. She couldn't possibly know how much simply hearing her voice hurt right now.

"Yes Ruby, I'm fine. I suddenly felt a little sick and needed to come lay down. I'm feeling much better now." Weiss was proud that she managed to keep her voice even. Nobody could tell how she was feeling inside.

"Okay, that's fine. Do you want me to leave you alone and let you rest?"

 _Yes, that's exactly what I want._ That's what she felt she needed to say. Which is why she felt so shocked when she said "No, let's just talk for a bit. How did the match with Pyrrha go?"

"Oh, it went great!" Even without looking at her, she could feel Ruby perking up. "I mean, it's not like I won or anything. I didn't even come that close. But I did come super close to being close to winning! It's definitely an improvement." Even with the storm raging in her mind, hearing Ruby being so very Ruby brought a smile to her face. She felt the storm abetting, if only slightly.

"I noticed your semblance changed back to red petals. Does it usually change every few weeks?" The words were spilling out faster than her brain could stop them. She knew this was the absolute worst time to ask, but she also knew she couldn't keep going without knowing the answer.

"Um, well, sort of just randomly." Ruby stammered nervously. Weiss rolled over to stare at her partner. "I don't have any control over the time period, so sometimes it's weeks and sometimes it's months. Why do you ask?" Ruby was blushing now, staring at the wall above Weiss. She was lying, Weiss knew it. That same hope starting forming in her heart again. The change was certainly for some reason not related to her, she knew that, but even the tiniest chance made her need to ask the question that had been scaring her for weeks.

"Well, they were white roses. I thought maybe they had something to do with me?" Weiss suddenly shifted her eyes to the ground. She knew she couldn't stand to see the younger woman answer her question.

"No, remember I told you it was just random? The white was just a coincidence. Why would you think that?" The words Weiss had known she would hear still brought that crushing feeling back to her heart.

"I thought maybe you had the same feelings that I do! At least, that's what I had convinced myself." Weiss almost shouted. She realized she was standing at the same time she realized there were tears flowing from her eyes. She stared straight at Ruby as she sat on the bed with a stunned look on her face.

She knew what would happen next. Ruby would stand up, a look of disgust on her face. She would run out of the room, she would run out of her life, and Weiss would be left standing there. Alone with her feelings, alone in the cold. Alone.

There was a sudden blur and then Ruby was just _there_ , holding Weiss in her arms, her face inches away, staring right at her with those silver eyes. Behind Ruby, a flurry of white rose petals were floating to the ground.

"Oh Weiss" she whispered, infusing so much emotion into those two little words. "Red is for the rest of the world. White is just for us." And with that she moved her head closer and kissed her with such passion than Weiss felt herself melting into it. The fire burned through her and washed away her fear, her doubt, her sorrow. She leaned into the woman she loved, and at that moment she knew she would never be alone again.

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 **And that's it for this part of Ruby's Secret. I hope you enjoyed it. They'll definitely be more, so stay tuned, but it might not be for a while. There's still a few details I need to settle before I can continue with the story.**


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